Seven Great Movie Suits

October 4, 2010

From the brilliant to the brilliantly corrupt, Movies.ie celebrates seven of the best movie suits!

GORDON GEKKO

He is the perfect representation of the corruptive nature of greed and the way it turned the soul-searchers of the Me Decade in Reagan’s America. The powerful central figure of Oliver Stone’s 1987 drama Wall Street, Gekko (Michael Douglas) gets filthy rich and stays that way by cutting legal corners and doing some insider trading in his career as a corporate raider. For his performance, Douglas won the Oscar for best actor, and the movie – and especially his role – has become in retrospect a symbol of the financial excess of the 1980s.

MIRANDA PRIESTLY

Pushy, arrogant, demanding, belittling, high strung – it must be high fashion, perfectly typified by Meryl Streep in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada . Rumoured to be based on Vogue’s own Anna Wintour, we suggest you watch this and The September Issue to make up your own mind.

RONNY COX

Here’s the situation: you get blown to pieces by a bunch of criminals while trying to do your job as a Detroit police officer, you get brought back to life as a bionic man with the same face and brain in a robotic body, and then, to top it all off, your boss tries to annihilate you with the ferocious Ed 209. Yes, can only be the world’s worst boss: Ronny Cox (Dick Jones)..

MICHAEL CORLEONE

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are some of the best American films ever made. At tHE center is Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who begins the films as the only member of the Corleone family not involved in organized crime but winds up taking the reins of the family after the death of his father. His ascent from citizen to vengeful son to cold-blooded architect of a criminal empire is stunning, and Michael proves to be a formidable and brilliant businessman.

CHARLES FOSTER KANE

Writer-director Orson Welles was in his mid-20s when he made his first feature film, Citizen Kane, co-authored in large part by Herman Manciewicz. Based on that of William Randolph Hearst, charting his rise from childhood poverty to a brilliant career built on sensationalistic journalism. His business brilliance comes from his unwillingness to compromise. His power is undone later in life by scandal and hardship, but who can forget that final scene?

HOWARD HUGHES

He may have been too crazy for Katherine Hepburn but there was no denying Howard Hughes was the industrious sort. In Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio star as Howard Hughes, one of the wealthiest people in the world in his lifetime and a pioneer in aviation, engineering, and filmmaking. The film charts the rise and eventual fail of a man who remains one of the world’s most brilliant business minds.

FRANK LUCAS

Perhaps the scariest thing about Frank Lucas of American Gangster fame is that he was a real man. Back in the 1970s, Lucas created a heroin empire in New York City by buying it pure and shipping back to the U.S. smuggled inside the coffins of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. Callously corrupt enough for you?